It's the early rainy season here in Nigeria, a country that falls within tropics. Recall that tropical climates are often characterized with abundant rainfall with a few months of annual dry season.
The rainy season means that the green vegetation is back, and so are the insects whose diets rely heavily on plant tissues and products such as roots, leaves, flowers, pollen, nectar, and so on.
Many of these insects are nocturnal. In other words, they are mostly active during the night and inactive in the day. One interesting thing about the nocturnal insects is that they are often seen converging where light is. Hence, a night with light on during the rainy season here is usually characterized with pesky insects whose bites can inflict terrible pains and reactions in individuals. They swarm around electric bulbs at night, creating nuisance in several ways.
This morning, I saw something unexpected. It was a bug crawling on the floor in the open daylight. Apart from the fact that I do not expect to see such a bug during the day, the beautiful colour of the animal was quite fascinating. Hence, I quickly reached out for my Samsung galaxy tab A (2016) to take a few good shots to the best of my ability.
I tried to Google search the image of the bug to see if something similar would be returned and I would be able to have an idea of the scientific name of the organism from there, however, nothing remotely similar results from the search. So, the options left for me as far as the identification is concerned is to leave it here for the professionals or ask in the relevant subreddit when I get access to my pc. I will try and update this blog once the bug is correctly identified.
Another interesting thing that popped up in the course of looking for the identity of this organism is the distinction between bugs and insects. Due to my ignorance, I have always thought that bugs are quite different from insects. However, it is interesting to bugs are actually insects in their own rights. In other words, all bugs are insects but not all insects are bugs. Insect is the general name given to the animals in the class Insecta, one of the numerous classes under the phylum Arthropoda.
The class insect a has been found to contain over 20 identified orders. More are still being identified as research continues in that regards. It is one of these orders that bugs distinctly belong - hemiptera. They have all the characteristics of insects and more.
Bugs are unique from insects in terms of their long segmented antenna, tough and dark wings, and mouth adapted for sapping among others. With this knowledge, one can easily know which insects are bugs and which are not.
All the images used in this post were taken by me using Samsung galaxy tab A (2016).
Feel free to comment if you have an idea of the identity of the organism in the post.
Thank you all for reading.